The Church in our times has the mission to reveal to the world God`s fatherly love. Reading the Holy Scripture we see that God often speaks about youth. First He mentions the youth of Israel and this appears to us at a first sight as a fragile reality. In Psalms somewhere they say that the man`s heart is inclined towards the bad ones from youth. Another psalm speaks aout the mistakes of youth and the Saint Paul, the Holy Apostle, in the second Epistle to Timothy urges us to run away of its temptations and fluctuations.
But in the Holy Scripture God speaks about the suffering of youth. For example in Psalm 87 the author says:` From my youth I have suffered and been close to death; I have borne your terrors and am in despair.` and in another psalm he says: `From my youth those who hate me, persecute me.` In consequence as we saw in these texts it is clear that youth needs a fatherly guidance and protection. In psalm 118 the longest one, which of course you know, it is discussed the way we can keep a pure youth.
The second aspect I would like to emphasize is that in the Holy Scripture youth is not presented only as a fragile reality but also as a period of acquiring wisdom. The Holy Scripture says: `Youth seeks God.`
In Solomon`s Book of Wisdom it is said: ` I have been seeking God from my youth.` In the same time from what we see in the Holy Scripture we understand that God seeks the young as well. In psalm 70 the author confesses to the Lord: `God, You taught me from my youth.`
Ultimately the third aspect presents youth as a reality open to future, as a prophetic reality, as they say in the Psalms that God is the One who inspires us.
These three aspects we talked about we can also discover in the Book of prophet Daniel in the sense that the three young men who got inside the burning oven and got out unharmed can be an example for the young of today. In other texts of the Holy Scripture, as it is for example the Book of Prophet Joel he says that the young have prophetic revelations.
Excerpt from The Orthodox youth and the modern society – Pr. Prof. Dr. Marc-Antoine Costa de Beauregard, Doxologia via http://doxologia.ro.
